The first thing I felt was the cold.
Not the biting chill of a winter night, but a sterile, surgical cold that seemed to seep directly into my marrow.
I tried to open my eyes. Only one responded.
The left side of my face was a mask of numbness, followed by a dull, throbbing heat that radiated from my empty socket. The warning from the "Key" had been literal. The price of that final Void Step had been collected.
I was half-blind.
I tried to move my hands, but the sound of heavy metal grinding against stone filled the room. My wrists were held by thick, obsidian-colored shackles—mana-dampers. They didn't just bind my flesh; they felt like lead weights tied to my very soul, dragging my "Rejection" deep into the mud.
"You're awake sooner than the Alchemists predicted," a voice said.
It wasn't Kaelen's arrogant drawl. This voice was dry, precise, and devoid of any emotion, like the clicking of gears in a clock.
I forced my remaining eye to focus.
The room was white. Blindingly, offensively white. No shadows, no dust, no signs of life. Just smooth stone and the faint hum of runic lights embedded in the ceiling.
A man sat in a high-backed chair across from me. He wasn't wearing armor. He wore a simple, dark grey robe, fastened with a silver pin in the shape of a scale. He looked unremarkable—middle-aged, thinning hair, spectacles perched on a sharp nose.
But his eyes... they were the eyes of a man who had dissected God and found the results disappointing.
This was Tomas Velin. The Strategist.
"Where is she?" I rasped. My throat felt like I had swallowed hot coals.
"The Gen girl? Or the part of your soul she took with her?" Tomas asked, tilting his head. He didn't wait for an answer. "She is being... processed. As for you, Rai Kurotsuki, you are currently the most expensive guest in the Astra Dominion."
I pulled at the chains. The obsidian glowed a faint, sickly purple.
"She stabbed me," I said, the memory of her cold hand in my chest flashing through my mind. "She took the Key."
"Did she?" Tomas stood up and walked toward me. He stopped just out of my reach. "Look at your arm, Rai."
I looked down.
The black veins—the "Ketsubetsu" pathways—were no longer just on my arm. They had crawled up to my shoulder, branching out across my chest like a map of a burnt world. At the center of my chest, where her hand had pierced me, was a scar.
It wasn't a jagged wound. It was a perfect, circular seal, pulsing with a faint, dark light.
"Aira Fenril didn't betray you to kill you," Tomas said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "She betrayed you to save the Key from being seized by Kaelen. She hid the Core inside the only place the Empire's sensors couldn't penetrate: the void of your own 'Rejection' magic."
I stared at the seal. My heart hammered against it, a rhythmic thud that felt like a trapped beast kicking at a cage.
"You mean... I'm still the carrier?"
"You are the lock," Tomas corrected. "And she is the only key that survived. But she isn't exactly in control of her actions anymore. The Empire has ways of making even the ancient races... cooperative."
He reached into his robe and pulled out a small glass vial. Inside, a tiny spark of silver light flickered weakly.
"This is a fragment of the girl's memory," he said, looking at the vial with clinical interest. "Would you like to know what she was thinking when she plunged her hand into your heart? She wasn't thinking of hatred. She was thinking of a promise."
"What promise?"
"A promise to a man who died a thousand years before you were born. A promise to find the one who could refuse the world's end."
Tomas stepped closer, his shadow falling over me.
"But that doesn't matter now. What matters is that Kaelen wants you dead, the Alchemists want you dissected, and the Emperor wants you turned into a weapon. I, however, want something else."
I looked up at him through my one good eye. My "Rejection" was stirring. Despite the mana-dampers, despite the exhaustion, a cold anger was beginning to crystallize in my gut.
"What do you want, Strategist?"
"I want to see if a man who has lost everything can still say 'No' when the world demands he kneel."
He reached out and, with a sudden, sharp movement, pressed a button on the side of my shackles.
The obsidian bindings didn't fall off. They tightened.
Spikes of cold metal drove into my wrists, drawing blood. The blood didn't drip. It was absorbed by the shackles.
"These are not just dampers," Tomas said, his face inches from mine. "They are syphons. They are currently draining your 'Rejection' to power the defenses of this facility. Every breath you take is literally fueling your own prison."
The pain was staggering. I felt my energy being dragged out of me, a constant, agonizing leak. My "Ketsubetsu" flared, trying to reject the syphon, but it was like trying to stop a waterfall with a sieve.
"If you want to live," Tomas whispered, "you have to stop rejecting the pain. You have to start rejecting the syphon itself. But be warned, Rai. If you succeed, you won't just break the chains. You'll break the logic of this room. And once you do that, there is no going back to being human."
He turned and walked toward the door.
"You have ten minutes before the Hounds arrive to escort you to the laboratory. I suggest you decide who you are before they get here."
The heavy stone door slid shut with a thud that echoed like a coffin lid closing.
I was alone.
The white light was blinding. The pain in my wrists was a constant, screaming siren. I could feel my life force—my very essence—being sucked into the obsidian.
**[Warning: Integrity at 18%.]**
**[System Logic Failing...]**
**[Mana Depletion in progress. Host will expire in 600 seconds.]**
The blue screen flickered in my vision, translucent and mocking.
I leaned my head back against the cold wall. I thought of Goro, running into the forest with his broken sword. I thought of my parents, whose faces were now nothing more than smears of grey in my memory. I thought of the girl, Aira, who was being "processed" because she tried to save a mistake like me.
The hunger returned. Not the hunger for moss and dirt.
A hunger for justice. No—that was too noble.
A hunger for *consequences.*
I closed my eyes. My one eye.
I stopped fighting the shackles. I stopped trying to pull away. Instead, I opened the gates.
*You want it?* I thought, addressing the obsidian. *You want my Rejection? Take it all.*
I pushed my consciousness into the black veins. I followed the flow of the syphon, tracing the path of my stolen energy. I didn't push back. I surged forward.
I became the rejection.
I didn't just refuse the magic; I refused the idea that the obsidian could contain me. I refused the law of thermodynamics that said energy had to flow from high to low.
I reversed the flow.
The shackles began to vibrate. The sickly purple glow turned into a violent, obsidian black. The room began to hum, then shake. The white stone walls started to crack, spiderwebs of dark energy snaking across the ceiling.
**[Causality Break initiated.]**
**[Error: Subject is reclaiming spent energy.]**
**[Warning: Overload imminent.]**
The pain was gone. In its place was a terrifying, hollow vacuum.
I felt the obsidian shackles shatter. Not into pieces, but into dust. The metal didn't just break; it lost the logic of being metal.
I stood up. My legs felt like iron pillars. The black veins on my chest were glowing with a dark, suffocating intensity.
The door to the cell hissed open.
Three soldiers in Imperial gear rushed in, their spears leveled at my throat. Behind them, I saw the shimmering, smoke-like shapes of the Hounds.
"Stay down!" the lead soldier screamed.
I didn't stay down. I took a step forward.
The air in the room warped around me. The white light of the runic lamps flickered and died, plunged into a darkness that I carried with me.
The soldier lunged with his spear. The tip was coated in anti-magic oil.
I didn't dodge. I didn't block.
I simply walked through the strike.
The spear didn't touch me. It bent around my body as if I were a ghost, the steel twisting like a wet noodle.
"My turn," I said.
I didn't use a punch. I didn't use a spell.
I simply whispered a single word.
"Ketsubetsu."
The room didn't explode. It just... emptied.
The three soldiers vanished. No blood, no screams. Just three empty suits of armor clattering to the floor. The Hounds let out a metallic whimper and dissolved into grey mist.
I walked out of the cell.
The hallway was filled with the sound of alarms, a piercing, high-pitched wail that set my teeth on edge.
I didn't know where I was. I didn't know how to find Aira.
But as I looked down at my hand, I saw something that made me stop.
The black veins were no longer just under my skin. They were beginning to grow *out* of it, forming small, obsidian-like scales on my knuckles.
I wasn't just using the power. I was becoming the power.
I looked toward the end of the hallway. Tomas Velin was standing there, watching me through the glass of a security booth. He wasn't calling for help. He was taking notes.
He smiled.
And then, he pointed toward a large, ornate door at the end of the corridor.
"The girl is behind that door, Rai," his voice came through the intercom. "But so is Kaelen. And he's had time to prepare."
I started walking.
Every step I took left a cracked, blackened footprint on the pristine white floor.
I didn't care about the trap. I didn't care about the Empire.
I only cared about one thing.
Aira had said I was the one who could refuse the world's end.
I was going to start by refusing the man who thought he could own my soul.
But as I reached the door, it didn't open.
It disintegrated.
And standing there, bathed in a light that felt like molten gold, was Kaelen.
But he wasn't alone.
Standing beside him, her eyes vacant and her silver hair stained with blood, was Aira.
She held a sword of pure light. And she was pointing it at my throat.
"Kill him," Kaelen commanded.
And without a second of hesitation, the girl I had tried to save lunged at me with the intent to erase my existence.
The Rejection had met its match.
The Key was now the Sword.
And I was the target.
I stood my ground, my one eye fixed on her.
"Is this the promise, Aira?" I whispered.
She didn't answer.
The sword of light descended, and for the first time since I woke up, I felt a flicker of something I thought I had lost.
Fear.
Not for my life.
But for what I would have to do to her to survive.
**[Causality Synchronization: 21%.]**
**[Final Warning: The next price is your sense of taste.]**
*Take it,* I thought. *I'm done eating dirt anyway.*
The world exploded into white.